Happy Hour guide: Charlie Wants a Burger

I’m not being facetious. The burgers at Charlie Wants a Burger, a new River Walk restaurant, are very good. You can tell they are made in-house. There is a freshness to them. The patties look like they were shaped by human hands and not rolled out in boxes out of a Sysco truck. I would not be surprised if the buns were made in-house, too. Particularly, I had the blue cheese burger and tasted The Local — an S.A.-style burger with Fritos and re-fried beans. They were both tasty, reminiscent of mom-and-pop joint burgers, and I’ll probably never eat them again.

They’re too expensive.

The blue cheeseburger and The Local are $11.95 each. And they don’t come with fries!

Give me the $9 Zinc Burger any time over Charlie Wants a Burger’s burgers. It’s slightly tastier than Charlie’s and it actually comes with fries. This is exactly why I don’t regularly order burgers at The Esquire Tavern — I love them there, but the fries come separate.

Unless the Express-News gives me an expense account (I pay for these reviews myself) or I become rich (I’m going to Vegas in July) I’m not going back to Charlie Wants a Burger for lunch or dinner.

Happy hour is a slightly different story. It’s not bad.

It borrows from Luke’s happy hour in terms of consistency. It’s 2-6 p.m. daily. And that’s very cool.

And if you’re looking for a basic beer selection — Bud Light, Shiner, Dos Esquis, etc. — then you should like it just fine. Sixteen-ounce domestic drafts are $3 and imports are $4. Bottled beer includes the basics — Stella Artois, Blue Moon, Negra Modelo, etc. — are $2.50 for domestic, $3.50 for imports. Red and white glasses of house wine are $4.

And all of that is fine and well.

The margarita, however, was disappointing. I had a 12-ounce Cactus Rita. At $5.50, it sounded like a good deal. Well, it took the bartender seconds — SECONDS — to place this fuchsia-colored drink before me on a single napkin. (A quick rant about the single napkin as a coaster: either give me a real coaster or provide a stack of napkins so that they resemble a coaster. You’d think the pattern of customers reaching for the napkin stack over and over again, day after day, would be an indicator that the single napkin as a coaster sucks.) The brevity of which the drink was delivered also says it was concocted at another time, a time way before when I actually ordered it.

It would have all been fine, but the Cactus Rita was watered-down and didn’t deliver the flavor bursts a margarita should.

The bar is also kind of weird. It’s like an after thought, a tiny complementary piece to the massive two-story River Walk restaurant. Charlie Wants a Burger is what used to be Zuni Grill. I wish the owners had built an actual sports bar — downtown S.A. lacks options in that category.

Appetizers are $5, which is a deal or a rip-off depending on what you get. Try Rick’s Chicken Wings. They’re pretty good, and meaty. They’re also covered in this thick nuclear-dark orange sauce. So they’re sweet, and not spicy at all, which I was fine with.

The potato chips in a basket is the rip-off. I don’t care if they’re homemade. It’s $5 for chips. However, the avocado cream dipping sauce was lovely. But still, $5 for chips?!

The service was inconsistent. The bartenders seemed poorly trained. One wanted to call last-call 40 minutes before closing time on a tab that ended up being more than $60. On another occasion, another bartender repeatedly misquoted the happy hour prices.